[bob1029]

What property of the gas range do you most enjoy?

I have recently swapped gas for induction and it dropped my meal prep time by 20~30% because I'm not standing around waiting for pans to get hot anymore.

If I was big into wok cooking, I'd probably keep the gas range. 99% of the time I just want to get a pan to 500F or boil a pot of water ASAP.

[__s]

Likely our experiences of electric stoves varies. I recall electric stoves which take a few minutes to heat up & didn't get very hot at that

Another nice situation was during the 2003 blackout my father was able to crank a turn table to play some records while lighting the stove with a match to cook dinner

[bob1029]

> I recall electric stoves which take a few minutes to heat up & didn't get very hot at that

You should try induction sometime. Convective electric is very slow by comparison and I have struggled with it myself for many years. My current cooktop can take a 10" iron skillet from dead cold to smoking hot in under 30 seconds using the maximum setting.

Only caveat with induction is the distance to element & cookware material constraints, both of which can usually be overcome with little difficulty.

[dminvs]

The fact that I was able to continue feeding my family hot food in the freezing cold 72-hour blackout in Texas! Big plus.

Electric or induction will never win me over unless I somehow end up in a house with a Powerwall.

[bob1029]

I went through the same TX freeze shitstorm too. Not a fun time.

I have a cheap 1500w portable induction cooktop I used for this exact purpose. On the lowest setting, it only pulls ~300W AC, so you can run it on the smallest of generators or portable power stations without any problems.

I have a 12,500W generator as well that could easily run my main induction range, but I reserved loading on this for making sure the furnace blower was moving. Didn't want to play games with fuel supply at the time.

[nemo44x]

Get better pans, then heating up isn't an issue.

I think it's nice to have an induction burner but I prefer gas for many reasons. One is the visual feedback from the flame. Another is that a flame is a 3D surface to cook on so I can tilt the pan to get certain sides hot when needed.

Induction is good at boiling water though.

[0xffff2]

As a general rule, the better the pan, the thicker it is and the longer it would take to heat up.

[nemo44x]

Conductivity matters. Copper pans that are thick heat-up really fast. This is one of their primary benefits in that they change temperature quickly based on the input. The heat-up and cool down quickly. This is why they are popular with chefs - fine tuned control on pan heat which you generally want to change while cooking.

Cast iron is the opposite. They take a long time to heat-up and a long time to cool down. Steel is somewhere in between.

[bob1029]

Precisely. This is why I started moving towards induction after I became obsessed with the capabilities of cast iron cookware.

[nemo44x]

Cast iron is excellent for storing a lot of heat and then releasing it over a long period of time for searing things, etc. I love my cast iron cookware. But it's not a good choice for more delicate cooking where you want to change the temperature of the pan quickly and temperature control matters. Copper is noted for this and is popular in professional kitchens for precisely this reason. And gas allows you to tilt a pan to blast one side which is important when reducing sauces or when you want the oil to rise up the side of something to crisp it, etc. Alas, copper won't work on an induction stove.

I've never heard a chef say that getting a pan hot and staying hot quickly is their number 1 optimization. Except for boiling water, which induction is great for.

But every home cook has different things they like I guess.

[bob1029]

> I've never heard a chef say that getting a pan hot and staying hot quickly is their number 1 optimization

I am certainly no chef. Just an engineer trying to optimize my time as much as possible, especially in areas where I do not really enjoy spending it.

Reduction of delicate sauces, et. al. is not something I am strongly concerned with. Fast meal prep is the name of the game for me. I do still have the ability to use gas if I really wanted to, I just like the speed of induction.

Do you prefer the cleanup required for a gas range as well? My induction cooktop can be perfectly cleaned within 10 seconds and I don't have to wait for it to cool down either.

When you look at all of this through the lens of time-value, I think it gets much more complex.

[nemo44x]

For sure - different tools for different jobs. We use different software Dev tools for different projects.

I’m a hobby home chef so I guess my optimizations are different. I insist on an offset smoker when a pellet smoker would use much less of my time, for example.

Awesome you cook though especially when it’s not your preferred way to spend time! It’s so easy to fall into the pattern of just getting delicious restaurant food all the time but cooking for yourself and family builds something.